Monday, 8 July 2013

Day 18: Switzerland Sightseeing

Today was the day we left Interlaken and took the scenic train to Montreux, which is in the west of Switzerland, in the French speaking area, at Lake Geneva. It started not too well with me in floods of tears and CC running barefoot thru town, now with shocking blood blisters on his feet. (Once again, CC I'm sorry...)

In other words, travelling is getting a bit stressful.

We had earlier looked into this Golden Pass-scenic panorama train from Interlaken to Montreux which seemed cool to do. Interrail.eu said you could get discounts with your Interrail pass, but so it's not completely free. So, finally, in Florence, we got round to reserving seats on the train, costing about 20e altogether. We got an e-mail confirmation sent, it said it needs to be printed out and shown on the train, but I just wrote down the reference number and seat numbers and hoped it'd be okay - finding somewhere to print would be too much hassle.

But the man at the ticket office said the reference numbers aren't good (ie. they didn't seem to be bought from the official Golden Pass-site), and he can't print them out for us. I was very very stressed to start with so I didn't take it well, so CC went looking for an Internet café. To no avail.

We got to our train and just decided we'd explain our situation to the conductor, and hope he has sympathy. He was an interesting conductor, he had some issue which meant nodding/shaking his head continuously, and I'm not sure he understood what we were saying, he just said yes, just find a seat and hope no one's reserved it. Ok...

Turns out, we didn't need the reservations. The 20e on the internet reservations were wasted money, but we got a very pleasant but slow scenic route through Switzerland. Especially the second train was awesome!

Many tunnels!

Second train

The views coming into Montreux were AMAZING, maybe the best views yet. This huge late, huge mountains, sunshine...

The lakeside was 3min walk away from the station so we went there. It was very pretty and relaxing and there were many cool market stalls since there was a Jazz Festival going on, but that also meant that the already-high-Swiss-prices were so high it made me cry. Lol, literally, yes, though that may've been also because after I had, very frustrated, placed the full 4,50-Franc (about 4euro) bottle on a rock, it promptly toppled over into the water and wasn't seen since... Nearly 20euros for a Fanta, a miniscule sandwich and a miniscule hamburger. Oh well.

Otherwise, Montreux was nice and had nice tiramisu icecreams OM NOM.

Never fails to happify

Randomly twinned with Wiesbaden, a town we'd be visiting in a few days...

Then we got the train up north, from Montreux toooooo BASEL oh yes James!!

Basel is cool because it's on the border of three countries - Switzerland, France and Germany. You can walk to any of those countries.

Our hostel was superclose to the station, the YMCA Hostel. (You can guess what song I was droning when we stepped in...) AMAZING. Ridiculously spacious, so much room, very efficient and friendly staff guy, a humongous kitchen you can use, loads of tables, sofas etc, and the rooms were big, had big, secure, easy-to-use lockers etc etc... The one and only minus was the squeakiness of the door.

We have become quite budget-concious now so we went to a local (awesome) supermarket and had chicken sandwiches à la Kiwi-beach style. Om nom!